CLIENT: Boeing Test & Evaluation
SERVICE: Knowledge Management Strategy
Designing And Implementing A Knowledge Management Strategy At Boeing Flight Test
Newly consolidated commercial and defense engineering teams needed a common approach to retain knowledge and develop expertise across the enterprise for previously disparate flight and lab test personnel using a variety of methods for a range of challenges.
How We Helped
A Knowledge Management (KM) and communications strategy was developed and executed which ensured efficient and consistent access to key knowledge for employees’ needs while leveraging existing best practices.
Listen & Learn
The first step was to conduct a series of data gathering sessions with groups of test engineers across 8 Boeing sites. Jyoti designed and facilitated in person data gathering sessions, building valuable relationships with the engineering community and generating buy-in to the strategy. An analysis of the data revealed 6 common opportunities to leverage access to knowledge, reduce inefficiencies in testing, and reduce program risk.
Strategy Development
The types of knowledge that needed to be captured included both implicit and explicit, so the strategy included knowledge capture (wiki, training roadmaps, and formal training) as well as knowledge transfer (structured mentoring for early and mid career). Cultivating a learning culture formed the foundation of the strategy. Existing frameworks were leveraged including wikis, enterprise community of practice resources, and the internal social network, InSite.
Create The Future
A weekly community of practice meeting formed the backbone of the strategy and was the most essential element. It provided a regular employee-led forum to share best practices, learn from enterprise-wide counterparts, and engage with senior leadership for organizational awareness and alignment, allowing a learning culture to be widely adopted. Jyoti launched a knowledge sharing award to recognize learning leaders.
Structured learning and development programming using common strategies, resources and tools were communicated to employees and all levels of management, and incorporated into existing training and development plans. Various types of training were delivered, and usage of wiki and lunch and learn offerings increased significantly.
Our Results
Solutions were adopted by enterprise wide teams of test pilots and test engineers across an organization of 6200 people.
01. 39 lunch and learn courses delivered over two years totalling 1064 training hours and averaging 40 people per session.
02. E-Book wiki users grew from 500 to 830 over three years as the resource was scaled nationwide from commercial to defense divisions.
03. Community of Practice average attendance grew from 22 to 59 people per meeting over 3 years.
04. New high-level training courses developed by a nationwide team of test pilots and test engineers (Intro to Flight Test (FT100) and 3 regional courses for the NW, SW and MW USA (FT101)) were delivered to all new employees and company-wide stakeholders.
“Jyoti has a contagious positive attitude. She is extremely thorough and totally committed to her project's success. She is recognized as the expert in developing knowledge management plans as well as in facilitating workshops and meetings. Jyoti has excellent written and oral communication skills and was instrumental in making our team cohesive and effective.”
—Vern Jackson, Senior Manager, Boeing